Mobile Devices Have An Imperfect Connection To The Internet

If your business sells its products through an eCommerce website, you are probably aware of the need to make it mobile friendly. A mobile friendly site either redirects mobile traffic to another specially designed site or it resizes and restructures itself to accommodate the screen sizes of the various mobile devices in use. Adapting your site to mobile traffic is the right move because according to marketer, mobile search will surpass desktop in 2015.

In addition, this traffic contains two great consuming demographics: moms and millennials. Both are smartphone power users, do a significant amount of their consumption through their mobile devices, and have the disposable income to back up their spending habits.

However, making your ecommerce site mobile friendly isn’t enough for three reasons:

Websites Are Often Too Slow For Mobile Traffic

The sluggishness of websites is both literal and psychological. Mobile access to the Internet requires the mobile device to interface through a cell tower which adds a lag time. This lag time gets added on to the usual server delays that desktop traffic sees. This means that the Internet is a slower place for mobile traffic than for desktop traffic.

In addition, the people accessing the Internet through their mobile devices are doing this while they’re on-the-go. This means they’re visiting your ecommerce store while they’re engaged in another activity. They are squeezing this online activity into narrow time windows which means they can’t wait around for slow websites. If your ecommerce site isn’t fast on their mobile devices, many will leave and your conversions will suffer.

Mobile Devices Have An Imperfect Connection To The Internet

It’s not uncommon for the connectivity of a mobile device to the Internet to be very poor. Sometimes there is no connection at all if the person is in a building, tunnel, or other location that is isolated from the cellular network.

Native Mobile Apps Are Luring Many Consumers Away From The Internet

There are mobile apps designed for nearly every need of the consumer. Many of these are native apps which reside entirely within the mobile device. Because they don’t require an Internet connection, they don’t have the two problems mentioned above. The response times of these apps are lightning fast and they are accessible 100 percent of the time. Consumers used to the mobile app experience will have even less patience for the interment based eCommerce site.

What does this mean for the business selling its products over an eCommerce site? It means that you should optimize your website for speed, make it mobile friendly if you haven’t already, and invest in mobile app development for eCommerce. Develop an app equivalent to your eCommerce store that is primarily native but updates itself whenever the mobile device has a good Internet connection. Many companies including Zappos and Amazon are doing this. Another benefit to having your own eCommerce app is that you get access to the millions of consumers who frequent app store distribution centers which include the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The growth of app downloads from these places is literally exponential.